Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 11:24 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 4:52 pmWell, Atheists...like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Nietzsche...the proud ones, the ones who trumpet their Atheism, exhibit their own anger and rebelliion against God, and in fact, often declare it as a badge of honour.
These 'proud', 'angry', 'rebellious' men are not your ideological "Atheists"; they are people who, like you, think that religions are false; they just happen to apply it to one more religion than you.
Well, Will, I don't have any reason to think that they are
your kind of Atheist. But
Atheists, they certainly are...though Dawkins, in particular, backs off that stance when pressed. They certainly revel in publishing books and taking speaking engagements in which they confidently denounce all kinds of "religions," including Christianity. But I don't find that
you are like them. So let me offer that caveat from the start, if I may.
However, such certainly do exist. And within the Atheist 'community,' if one can even use such a word, these are highly celebrated figures -- often the first ones referred to by even more-informal Atheists, whenever they attempt to dismiss "religions." So I think the claim applies very fairly: and if they were less vocal in declaring it themselves, perhaps you'd have a case in suggesting they're being misrepresented; however, their own claims carry the case very well.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Aug 01, 2023 2:03 am...IF God exists, then objective morality is not at all hard to understand; and even a reasonable Atheist would indeed have to concede that.
Nonsense. A reasonable atheist could reasonably ask whether morality is objective because God says it, or God says it because it is objective. I'm not a mind reader, but based on your previous comments, I'm confident your response to that will be that God's nature is supreme goodness.
Not quite, but not quite wrong.
I would simply point out that some proposed dichotomies are false. If I ask, "Is Will a male or a husband," or "Is Will a male or a Bouwman," then plausibly the answer could be "Yes, both." Likewise, the dichotomy of "Does God prefer some moral imperative because it's good, or because He's God," proposes a dichotomy between "God" and "good" that would have to be justified by the proposer. And if the proposer cannot do that, then there's not reason not to think that God commands a thing both because he is a good God, and because what He commands is good.
So if that's going to continue to be a dilemma, the ball would be in the skeptic's court to show that it was impossible for "good" and "what God prefers" to be the same thing. And I can't see how he's going to be able to do that...though if you have a proposal on that, I'm all for entertaining it.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 4:52 pmJust as I would concede, quite freely, that IF God did not exist, then there would be no objective morality (and, we might add, subjective morality would be a mere imagining). That's all totally fair.
Well, according to your objective morality, the vast majority of human beings will spend eternity being tortured, but that is the price of freedom. It is hard to imagine a subjective morality that could be worse.
"Tortured"? I wouldn't say that. Not all unpleasantness or even suffering is "torture." A great deal of what we experience in that line has more to do with natural consequences than anything. And sometimes, it has to do with justice, as well. For justice requires us to get exactly what we deserve -- not a bit more, and not a bit less. And if our complaint is that God is unjust, then that can be answered by Him being perfectly just -- which is just what He promises to be, at the end of it all.
So there's really only one remaining question: if God is just, what is it that I justly deserve, given who I am and what choices I've made with my freedom? And since I have no window on your heart, I can simply leave that question with you, for your own consideration.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Sep 08, 2023 3:38 pmThe Theist says, "There's evidence," and the Atheist says, "There's none." And the Theist cannot beat the Atheist's strategy, because how can you argue with somebody who simply refuses the evidence before him?
Well again that's projection. You simply refuse the evidence of human evolution.
I wouldn't say I do.
I fully accept that some of the evidence around us, if assembled in a certain way and eliminating other evidence, could be used to compose a narrative about human evolution. I just don't think there's anything close to enough evidence, or sufficient reason to suppress contrary evidence, to justify that kind of selective evidence-taking.
What I have from my own experience is not, as you claim, "thousands of examples of fossils consistent with human evolution," and if I may say, it's also obvious to me that the scientific community doesn't have them, either. If they did, they would be producing them. But as the monkey-to-man fiasco shows us, what actually happens is that if a single fossil, one which even potentially might seem to support the monkey-to-man theory was ever found, it was seized upon with far too much enthusiasm and credulity by that same community that purports to be "scientific" about it, and the result was that they got bamboozled repeatedly by their own credulity and enthusiasm.
You will remember the rejoicing an press-coverage of that sort of thing, won't you? Like when the alleged "Lucy" fossil (40 percent of the skeleton of a female of the alleged hominid species
Australopithecus afarensis) was found, what great rejoicing and fanfare there was: but this clearly says there were no "thousands" of Lucys. If there had been, then this one would have been of no particular note to anybody. What's evident is that the human-evolution narrative is still a story in search of evidence -- the glee and desperation with which any such "fossil" is seized upon testifying eloquently to just how hard it really has proved to put any such evidence behind the human-evolution narrative.
But again, I know you can say, "Well,
this is a fraud, but
the next one won't be." A lot of Evolutionists seem to operate that way all the time. And I don't have any particular rejoinder to such optimism, though I don't share it at all.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 4:52 pm...and one that's been justified by the previous debate. For example, the impossibility of an actual regress of causes is an absolute slam-dunk mathematical proof of a First Cause of some kind. What are you to make of people who don't accept the truth of mathematics?
Whatever mathematics proves, it only applies to mathematical proofs.
If that were true, engineering would be impossible. In actual fact, mathematics is, in science, considered the master-discipline that unlocks all sorts of things in the real world. And in practice, it does, we know and can see.
All the more of a marvel, then, if we disregard it in this one area that conclusively disproves the eternal-universe hypothesis.
